“There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy. It is a
ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and despair, showing the
possibility of consolation.”Leo
Tolstoy

What if melancholy can be passed down through generations, not just
culturally but at the level of our DNA? Melancholia has long been seen as a key
element in artistic inspiration, along with a way of turning pain and sorrow into
healing, and ultimately, an acceptance of life’s inescapable emotional sufferings
and wounds.

The science of “behavioural epigenetics”
is now exploring how this might actually work by studying the ways in which “signals
from the environment trigger molecular biological changes that modify what goes
on in brain cells.” It’s a controversial idea because up until recently, it was
thought that epigenetic information was erased over time, leaving a blank slate
for every new generation.

But what if genes that have been influenced by negative environmental
factors like famine, conflict, slavery or alcohol abuse could
retain some stressful memories that leave molecular scars on our children and
grandchildren? The implications would be profound, especially because genetic
engineering would be almost irresistible—and that industry has a far from illustrious history.

A recent study by Rachel Yehuda and others
at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York on the transmission of stress effects
from holocaust survivors to their offspring claims exactly this—that severe
psycho-physiological trauma experienced by parents has a measurable impact on the
next generation. Stress wasn’t just culturally transmitted through holocaust
stories; it was transferred at the level of the molecular biology of the brain.

So could there be positive
connections across generations in this way, and if so, could these links be
consciously strengthened or created?

Philosophers have long entertained the idea that melancholy and
creativity are inter-connected. Friedrich
Nietzshe said that the suffering brought on by melancholy—“this evening
twilight devil” as he called it—was vital to the mind and soul, even sacred.
Suffering and difficulty, he thought, must be embraced, cultivated, and
carefully crafted. Not for him the cowardly and numbing reassurance of what he
called the “slave
morality” of human timidity when faced with pain.

Without some kind of torment present in the soul, nothing of real or
lasting value or beauty can be created. Without that dichotomy of emotional
experiences; without knowing the extremes of sadness and joy, we can never
fully know or feel all that life is. Similarly, Soren
Kierkegaard wrote that melancholy was his “intimate confidant,” his “most
faithful mistress,” and a place where he found “bliss.” Like Nietzsche, he
thought that the suffering brought on by angst—melancholia’s more animated
cousin you might say—was a necessary prerequisite for creativity.

Indigenous and shamanic cultures such as that of Aboriginal Australia
have no problem in believing that melancholy and other experiences among our
ancestors can shape our current reality for good and ill, and that in some way
we can be psychically healed in the here and now by understanding this
relationship. Aboriginal culture believes that the spirits of our ancestors
reside in the crevices and caves of holy mountains, and that the hum of the
wind, if understood and interpreted correctly, will reveal messages and signs
from the dead.

Shamans, Sufi mystics and other ‘psycho-spiritual travellers’ have
always played a highly-revered cultural and spiritual role as avatars who
expand their ordinary consciousness through rhythmic dancing, hypnotic drumming
or ingesting psychoactive substances, and who break through into suspended time
or “dreamtime.” In
doing so, they can act as a bridge between what is perceived as ordinary
reality and other non-ordinary transpersonal realms.

As a result, the ‘wounded healer’—the great global archetype associated
with visionary shamanism as a person with acute mental perceptions—is able to
‘bring back’ knowledge and wisdom from outside of our ordinary,
three-dimensional, linear space and time. The goal of bringing back this wisdom
from dreamtime is to heal and regenerate all of the community on both a
spiritual and a societal level. Entering dreamtime is understood as a deeply
creative act.

In the Buddhist tradition, Avalokiteshvara, the “Buddha to be” who is worshipped
in both male and female forms has vowed to postpone enlightenment until s/he
has released all sentient beings from Dukkha,
the Sanskrit word for suffering. Suffering in Buddhism is understood as one of
the four great Noble Truths. In the Fire Sermons,
preached over two and half thousand years ago, the historical Buddha,
Siddhartha Gautama, said that we live with delusion or avidya caused
by suffering, and as a result we are “burning:”

“The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness
is burning … Burning with what? I say it is burning with birth, aging and
death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”

Hence, suffering and the sadness it brings is a universal part of human experience—a
visceral part of who we are at our very core. We can run from this truth if we
want to, but it will catch up with us in the end. There is no hiding place, and
no amount of 21st century consumption or other distractions will douse our burnings.

Melancholy is a particular kind of sadness, an emotion born of suffering
but reflective rather than creating a debilitating depression. It lies
somewhere “in the shade between sadness and despair” as Leo Tolstoy put it, “where
the possibility of consolation might lie.” Melancholy also has a faint quality
of mourning, even a kind of grief, but for what? Our lost innocence? All that
is lost in the past, and all that will be lost in the future?
The human condition is full of bewilderment, misunderstanding, loss and grief
because we will lose the people we love, and because things
will not work out in the ways we want, so mourning and regret are inevitable.

As Susan Sontag memorably noted,
depression is melancholy minus the charms. Depression paralyses, inflicts
inertia and often steals our ability to function; whereas melancholy can act as
a creative spur, building a hard won modicum of self-knowledge to draw on.
Depression closes out the world and reduces our experiences to the
claustrophobic confines of our own heads; whereas paradoxically, melancholy can
open up these claustrophobic walls to acceptance and self-knowledge.

If we are to stay sane in the world we must actively seek out this kind
of melancholy, for if we don’t we won’t be able to understand ourselves fully.
We risk one-dimensionality and superficiality—two of the many curses brought on
by 21st century capitalism. This cannot be self-indulgent, nor just another excuse
to inflict even more pain on our ‘guilty,’ ‘undeserving’ and unexamined selves.

Thankfully, great art can console us, particularly great music. Music is
surely our greatest medium of expression, and if melancholy sometimes feels
like a vast enveloping grief, then perhaps music and the consolation it brings can
help us to grieve. The melancholic note in popular music—the ‘blue’ note
understood by the great African American Jazz artists of the twentieth
century—heals, soothes and, if we allow it, can transform our suffering into
this kind of knowing and accepting melancholia. Musicians from Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson to Miles Davis, Van Morrison and Lennon and
McCartney have all understood
this sense of pathos, and have felt and communicated it intuitively.

Take Lennon and McCartney for
example. Both were the creative driving force of the Beatles. Perhaps the
lonely and aching impulse of two young boys who had lost their mothers produced
a symbiotic psychic energy that spurred them to create something remarkable
from abrupt and searing pain. But could they have been mining something even
deeper? Could emotional trauma have been passed down from earlier generations? And
could the same be said of slavery and racism as part of the genesis of 19th
and 20th century African American blues? It seems plausible. After
all, Smith, Davis, Lennon and McCartney, David Bowie and the rest are surely
our culture’s great avatars and shamans. It is they who soothe, guide and
enlighten, and make it all worthwhile.

Appreciating great music is not
just an intellectual exercise. It is much more than that. We don’t just hear
music, we feel it, and in a melancholy state we do so even more
intensely. If you haven’t felt music
or any other art form with that intensity then Nietzsche was surely right:
without that intensity of feeling, life would be a mistake.

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